Alibaba to use Silk Road to boost SME trade

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group is planning to leverage China’s Belt and Road initiative to help the country’s SMEs boost levels of international trade, according to reports inChina Daily this week, with CEO Jack Ma urging policy makers and business leaders to create new rules and laws to strengthen trade and development. “We have plans for Canada, India and Japan, and we have plans for the Belt and Road Initiative,” Ma told delegates at the 2017 China Green Companies Summit in Henan Province on Sunday, with SMEs in Malaysia and Thailand also likely to benefit from the Chinese internet company’s new e-commerce hubs that will boost connectivity across the region. Ant Financial, Alibaba’s payment affiliate, is also planning to create mobile payment services similar to Alipay’s – its Chinese third-party online payment platform – in countries along the Belt and Road route, “Small and medium-sized enterprises contribute to 95% of global economic growth,” Wang Jian, an economics professor at the University of International Business and Economics said. “The private sector can play its part in revisiting and potentially revising rules of world trade through business practice.” Last week, the UK’s Daily Telegraph reported that Alibaba was searching for warehouse locations along the route of the recently launched China to UK rail link and was understood to have approached property developers across the continent who have buildings situated close by to the 16-day, 7,456-mile train route that passes through China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France before crossing under the Channel and arriving in the east end of London in Barking.